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Hanford is currently embroiled in the world’s largest environmental cleanup, which includes the problematic construction of a $12.2 billion waste treatment plant. The site is burdened with an aging work force, a history of secrecy and a reputation for punishing whistleblowers. Meanwhile, even as stories of costly Hanford programs appear in the news, citizens of Washington state learn very little about the site and its history. Engineer-turned-poet Kathleen Flenniken will present a personal take on the history of her hometown, Richland, and on the Hanford nuclear site where both she and her father worked. She will explore the difficulty she has had facing up to a friend’s father’s death of a radiation illness. In telling this personal history, Flenniken will help us break through the mind-numbing numbers – waste that will last for tens of thousands of years, billions of dollars spent, etc. – to get to the people and culture of Hanford. (Lyndatrue)… (more)

Plume: Poems (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series) by Kathleen Flenniken – PALS celebrates National poetry month with Plume. Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. Her cycle of poems based on real places and events are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience.

Reading PALS is a monthly book discussion group. PALS is free and open to the public, no reservations needed and attend as often as you wish. Discussions are the last Wednesday of every month in the Port Angeles Main Library Archive Room at 6:30pm

Read the current month’s selection and attend the discussion.

A limited number of copies of the PALS monthly selections are available for check out at the previous month’s meeting. Remaining copies are available at the customer service desk on a first-come first-served basis. You may also read your own copy, borrow a regular copy from any branch or buy a copy from a local bookstore. Port Book & News offers a 20% discount on PALS selections. Port Book & News is located at104 E. First Street, Port Angeles, WA 98362. Telephone: 360-452-6367.

Ask staff about LARGE PRINT, downloadable audio and e-print, and audio cd versions which may be available.

Questions regarding PALS can be emailed to Lorrie Kovell at lkovell@nols.org or by phone at 360-417- 8514. (MDGentleReader)… (more)

Humanities Washington is bringing Washington State Poet Laureate (2012 -2014) Kathleen Flenniken to Eagle Harbor Books. She will talk about and read from several of her books, including her most recent, Plume.

The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe.

The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet.

“Surely it is rare to come across a poet of familiar contemporary experience like Kathleen Flenniken, whose imaginative, convincing tropes, sense of rhythm and sound, sharp intellect, narrative instinct, and resistance to cliché transform that experience into art so compelling that it makes us wonder—how have we come to doubt it could be done?”—Marit MacArthur, The Bloomsbury Review.

Flenniken was raised in Richland, Wash., and currently lives in Seattle. She holds engineering degrees from Washington State University and the University of Washington, as well as a Masters in Fine Arts degree from Pacific Lutheran University. She is president of Floating Bridge Press, a nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing Washington poets, and teaches poetry writing to students of all ages with the support of arts organizations including WSAC, Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program and Jack Straw Productions.

Flenniken’s first book, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award. Her second collection, Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), about the Hanford nuclear site, was recently chosen for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series.

Plume is set at the Hanford Nuclear Site and in Richland, Washington, where Kathleen Flenniken grew up and where her childhood friend's father died of a radiation illness. Flenniken uses a range of poetic forms and voices, memoir, and research, to explore a personal and cultural history at odds with the environmental facts.

Kathleen Flennikenis the 2012 – 2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. She is the author of Plume, chosen by Linda Bierds and released in February by University of Washington Press, and Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her other honors include fellowships the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust, and a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Seattle.

About Caleb Barber, Beasts & Violins:

Bellingham poet, Caleb Barber, earned an English/Creative Writing BA from WWU, and an MFA in poetry from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. He currently works days at an aerospace machine shop. He has been widely published in literary magazines, most notably with a feature in Poet Lore. He also has a poem in Best American Poetry 2009. Village Books is pleased to carry copies of Caleb's poetry book, Beasts & Violins.

About Rachel Mehl:

Rachel Mehl has an MFA from University of Oregon. She has published poems in Alaska Quarterly Review, Portland Review, Poet Lore, and Willow Springs. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and both her chapbook manuscript, Letter to Amber in November, and her full-length manuscript, Why I Hate Horses, have been finalists in national competitions.